Back in 2007, January Jones was poised to take Hollywood by storm. She had been working as an actress for nearly a decade and all her hard work was starting to pay off. In the past, she had been cast in various commercially successful films (Anger Management, American Wedding, and Love Actually to name a few), although she would only land minor roles. But then, in 2007, Jones made her debut as Betty Draper in the AMC drama Mad Men. Just like that, she went from a relative unknown to a star on the rise.In fact, in the years that followed, the South Dakota native booked more prominent roles in both television and film. She also went on to score her first Emmy nod for her performance in the series. Amidst all this success though, how much did Jones really earn from playing Don Draper’s (Jon Hamm) wife?
January Jones Wasn’t Interested In Becoming Betty Draper At First
By the time casting for Mad Men was underway, Jones wasn’t playing around. She was looking for a role with a greater onscreen presence. And so, when she was approached about the idea of playing Betty Draper, Jones wasn’t amused. Back then, the character barely had lines.
“Matt Weiner [show creator] said, 'Listen, there's this tiny role at the very, very end of the wife,’” the actress recalled. “And I immediately was like, 'But she doesn't do or say anything. Of course, I will read for the wife, but there's nothing to say.’”
And so, Weiner and his team rushed some lines in for Jones to use during her audition. “He said, 'Well, come back in.' It was either the next day or two days later, and he had written two scenes, like, overnight for her, so that I had something to audition,” the actress explained. “And both those scenes ended up in Season 1.”
Jones may have agreed to audition for Betty, but she was quite keen on pursuing the role of secretary Peggy Olson. From the beginning, however, even Christina Wayne, AMC’s senior president of original programming, could see that it just wouldn’t work. She was the one who encouraged Jones’ manager to have her audition for Betty Draper in the first place.
“He sent her in for Peggy and Matt [Weiner] was like, 'What the hell was that?'” Wayne recalled. On the other hand, she knew Jones was Betty from the beginning. “I had always thought she should play Betty because I saw her as this Grace Kelly Stepford wife type,” she explained. “Super beautiful and super icy cold.”
How Much Did January Jones Make From ‘Mad Men’?
Mad Men may have been quite a successful show but compared to other Emmy-winning shows, the AMC series paid relatively lower even when it was already a massive hit. It was reported that the most Jones had received from the show was $100,000 per episode. In contrast, other shows agreed to significantly higher rates once they started to rack up awards (Friends famously paid its cast members $1 million per episode).
Despite this, however, it doesn’t seem like Jones harbored any bad feelings towards the show. The pay was decent, at least, and perhaps, more importantly, it was stable. “Financially, we don’t get paid very much on the show and that’s well-documented,” Jones once said of Mad Men in a cover story interview for Marie Claire. “On the other hand, when you do television you have a steady paycheck each week, so that’s nice.”
The show came under turmoil during its final years as AMC reportedly wanted to cut costs by cutting some cast members after reaching a two-year $30 million salary deal with Weiner himself. At the same time, the studio also reportedly wanted to cut two minutes from each episode of the show so that ads would have a little more airtime.
And while Weiner didn’t confirm AMC’s demands regarding the runtime of the episodes, he did outright deny that his supposed salary demands were the reason for the show’s season 5 premiere delay.
“What was interesting in the middle of it, as a tactic, they [AMC] told the public the show was going to be delayed through the non-cast negotiations and that was not true,” Weiner remarked. “I was trying to get the show on. And I said it wasn’t true. They have since said it wasn’t true. It was irreversible.”
Meanwhile, as far as cast negotiations go, it was reported that Hamm managed to secure an eight-figure deal for the final seasons of Mad Men. In contrast, Jones and co-stars Elisabeth Moss, Christina Hendricks, and Vincent Kartheiser only secured six-figure deals per episode. Nonetheless, these renegotiated rates for Jones and company were said to already represent significant salary bumps compared to what they received during the first season of the hit show.
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